Evergreen Course Blog | Spring 2011 | Reclaiming Public Spaces

Hi All,

Wednesday I’ll be lecturing on Artaud, so do re-read (or read) the Artaud Preface to Theater and Its Double.  If you get the chance, read some of Theater and Its Double, excerpted in the google books link below that.  After the lecture we’ll look at King’s Letter.  There are no further readings for Wednesday.

As you can see, right below this post is the repository for your mall-Mayer stories, and, as I said, up till Saturday I will post your pieces as they come to me via email. 

Finally, a reminder that on Saturday we will begin to form steady-state groups, i.e., small groups that will last the quarter and be your trusted peer critique groups.  So, do, as usual, bring your own work (portfolio) on Saturday.  We’ll begin the process of looking at individual projects.

Solidarity,

David

1.  Chris Delamater &

Eating-in-Full-View tells us that this is nothing, if not a socialist mall.

They are raffling off presidential t-shirts and selling hats with eyes for holes.

From Eating-in-Full-View, “if my nuts were that big, I’d be a good dancer.”

The president responds, “we just want to squish things.”

The president squishes things and sells t-shirts.

Eating-in-Full-View refuses to dance.

2. David Michael Wolach &

A rebellious quotidian anything goes my ass.  Careful consideration here.  Never lift pen from paper.  Never, as in until you do, think: a tale, a tall or short one, blanched, chewed hacked, lots of fall the reinvention of fall might be a character, might not depends on the eye, the time, the place, what you ate for breakfast if you did.  Never listen to poets… never explain your work.  Never might be a character or a plot or a plotline or a plot against.  Fluidity of, see “never.”  As in “never again”?  As in: “should have zipped it when I had the chance”?  Should I write this one or that one.  Careful consideration in the now lost present.  Jill went up the hill there was some water there and shit, and that’s I why said to Leonard now, what, a year ago: “you wrote a poem? you got another corpse on your hands as soon as those clams are gone.”  Word-garnish.  In a word what’s it got to do with you?  I’m pointing and you have to guess where.  Story says: thank god for “stars.”  Without them we wouldn’t have metaphors, let alone friends.  Enemy combatant would have gone, right, here.  This is why you edit your, um, like, tale.  Could have ripped it with household utensils.  Because of thanks we can imagine new things.  Billy Maze here to tell you about some new old product for ripping.  A story about a man with a beard created in god’s image, which is to say, by god, for god, is god, the between things between your late night shows.  You can take the edge there where the neckline meets the bristle and start carving wood.  Eventually you’d have the likeness of some animal and craftsmanship would die under the weight of a fucked up etymology.  And so I fell in love with her on pg. 7.  Alerted to ACHING ARMS.  A story about genetic dystrophic  hyperspasticity.  Take that, name caller.  Much talk about opens and closeds.  It’ll wane as Adorno says, because Adorno said, “Today’s artists would rather do away with unity altogether, producing open, unfinished works, or so they think. The problem is that in planning openness they necessarily impart another kind of unity unbeknown to themselves.”  A character in a story called histrionics.  Boo.  Say the armchair laborers.  When they say free write my question is from where?  Location, location, location they could have said in the middle-to-late beginning of aforementioned plot.  To kill: here’s an overused verb in this context, ex context, ex-as-prefix for a pluralism isn’t urgent Barrett Watten wrote urgently and underlined while internalizing self-perceived pay per view smack down stapled in a way we now call DIY but they call “quaint” below 42^nd Street, you know where the plane went swimming a couple days ago.  Now another prefab eulogy.  As in: “now” redundant in the face of all that harmless verb assault.  Looking for a new thing is a kind of hunting and aren’t we over that?  Sounds tall-grass Republican to me.  So I fell down in there and she lifted me up once again, said, take stock of the soup you just made.  Doesn’t smell delicious, smells like Baudelaire.  How many stories, ten, eleven, apartment sized and over hydrated just lately.  Her slips just fall away like dates, blind ones and all this talk about writing sentences with at least one “x.”  Obsession with the one organ that makes sense.  Make sense so far? Explore possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries, almanacs for language use.    She writes.  A guy walks up to me, says: “take one tablet by mouth twice a day.”  No swallow.  No digest.  Imagines a dog tugging rope with the one hand he’s got.  Stories don’t always end well.  And the idea you have to interrogate simple direction detached from mothership is risky business I think the FDA would approve you suggesting re this.  Don’t you think there’s a political dimension?  What, like length?  Like a hole opens in the sky and suddenly there’s politics heckling you with a big foam finger?  Ignorance is bliss is a theme inverted by most readers of [insert your story].  Experiment with theft & plagiarism in any form that occurs to you.  Unless there’s nothing to own.  What if there’s nothing to own?  What then?  The klepto is lost, reduced to orange upholstered pouf chairs.  This is not doing nothing but losing using refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.  This is doing nothing but losing using refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing a noun. 

3. Andrea Paulik &

Mirror, wood or lucite frame.  It could be any, I suppose.  I just need to choose a material.  There are 24 ways to say the color, so that leaves me with some flexibility.  My client thinks the snow is funny – to each their own.  In my opinion it’s just good for a lamp, adjustable metal base.  If you need me, though, I’ll make it easy for you to see me.  I know it’s hard sometimes.  My name?  Whatever it was they called a hat long ago – people’s hats – I never did see what kind of hat hers was.

 4. Dave Walkord &

The day was dreary and the herd was small

How long do you have to wait before your mom calls?

Spinich and peperoncini and jalapanos, that’s all

You guys have all the phones. Pretty soon it will be all touch screen. I’ll have to bring my mom. I’ll have to upgrade. that’s pretty cool!

Anything with rechargeable bateries is a good thing

Thats a girl, look this way and don’t get dizzy!

The mall rats run through the coridoors and passage ways, content with just a small amount of food.

 Hi All,

Here are the short few readings due for this Wednesday.  Though I am pushing lecture back to half of Saturday and the following Weds, always good to get this work under your belts earlier rather than later. 

Note on the mall: please stake out your spot at 6pm-730, record where you are, and collect language.  Please bring that language collection and description of place to class on Saturday.  If I finish up early, I may meet you there at the mall fyi.

Solidarity,

David

Antonin Artaud – Preface to Theater and its Double:  http://artsci.wustl.edu/~marton/Artaud.html

Bernadette Mayer – STORY: http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/STORY/html/

MLK – “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Coltrane – Alabama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j_TDoOPnIA

LINK O THE WEEK: http://www.deadskinpress.com/works/aiimt.html

Optional Further Reading for Those Interested:

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ISSUE 1 (1978) Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein ed.:

http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/LANGUAGEn1/

Theater and Its Double, exceprts: http://books.google.com/books?id=bmf8CMzu3kIC&dq=%22Artaud%22+and+%22Theater+and+its+Double%22&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result

Why begin a creative writing course with Derrida and Thalia Field?  We began a discussion about why this might be so, talking around the possibility of possibility within (our use of) language.  Specifically, language structures (large and small) that are familiar and those that are less so – realizing that this binary of what counts as familiar (or belongs in the household) and what is alien or monstrous (or is “not of the household”) is itself unstable.  Comments on the blog (cf) have furthered this discussion, a couple pointing out a) that the monstrous might not only be welcomed, or fetishized, in contemporary western cultures, but is eventually subsumed, tamed, by the very schema of these cultures.  I want to hold off on that discussion until we take a peek at Adorno and Wittgenstein later in the quarter.  For now, the main thread here is this: Derrida and Field’s recognition of possibility inherent in language (the signified, as it were, is a limitless set), but also that many, sometimes the majority, of interpretations, readings, possibilities, are repressed.  Where the sources of this repression are multiple, laden with power, and work, as we can probably guess by looking out the window or at our electricity bill, along heirarchical gridlines.

Where I find commonality in the two texts we’ve read goes beyond acknowledgment or recognition of possibility and repression and shows itself textually, i.e., in form.  Derridian criticism (leaving the many problems of deconstruction aside) manifests, indeed embraces (as in Of Grammatology) contradiction and erasure, or, as Derrida would have it the theses that ground his notion of arche-writing. If, as Derrida suggests, the possibility of monstrosity is parasitic on a temporally-determined marginally acceptable set of [repressed] interpretations, then what follows are the implicit axioms of a) language-as-public, b) meaning-as-unstable, and c) writing-as-collaborative.  A, B, and C show themselves in Field’s work.  Formally, the process by which writing-as-collaboration (i.e., reading=writing in some way yet to be discussed here), is overtly simplistic.  Anyone who has played with Mad Libs automatically knows the game.  Yet, it is the overt pointing to the idea of behind the Mad Lib (what makes the Mad Lib possible), performing a text in different ways potentially infinitely, that Field is in part interested in.  The pointing shows the importance of a worn exercise, its prevalence in what we do when we read almost anything, and most importantly, processes that hide behind or within texts and our ideas about their meanings.  I take it to be somewhat obvious that the set of possibilities one bring’s to Field’s Theater is very much like post-Brechtian alienation–a naked text daring you to stare at your own habituation as you fill in the brackets. 

I’m interested in what you think about the relation between these texts, admitting, of course, that one is a part of an interview (and Derrida’s work insists on drawing distinctions between speech and writing).  I’m more interested in you using Derrida’s talk as a way to warm your brain to performing Field’s Theater.  Feel free to post your comments or send me, via email, your Field pieces (or any other longer writing), and I’ll post it on the main blog page.

Optional Further Readings:

For a decent intro to Derrida, go here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/derrida.htm#SH3b

Thalia Field, Point and Line

Dear All,
 
Happy holidays.  I hope you are all at least relaxing, if not having a wonderful holiday.  Welcome to Experiments In Text.  I expect that this quarter will be exciting, enriching, and challenging–like a romantic comedy.  
 
This welcome email is, well, to welcome you to our course, but also to lay out a few of the basics.  So, without further ado:
 
EXPECTATIONS & COVENANT
 
It should go without saying that it is expected we will be able to share our work with each other, collaborate, and critique, in ways that nurture mutual respect and trust.  We want to cultivate a diverse environment, one that necessitates our welcoming of difference, both cultural (ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, gender) and personal-intellectual.  Collaboration and critique must be anchored in the process of trying to understand and preserve differences while searching for common ground.  As for a covenant, I’m rather anarchic politically. I feel that contracts, while important, can also be an impediment to working on each other’s needs and desires all the time.  So, if as a group you would like to come up with a short covenant for this course, I welcome that, but will not be requiring one.  
 
I do, however, expect that you will come to class on time and prepared, do the small amount of readings, and forgo any worry that you have about your “creative abilities.”  This is not a contest course – quite the opposite.  This is a collaborative course – a more difficult kind of environment than one which asks whether your poetry or prose is “good” or “great”.  Most importantly, we should be having fun.  Pleasure is taboo these days.  Let’s not perpetuate that taboo.  If you aren’t having fun making things in this course, something’s gotta change.
 
READINGS & SYLLABUS
 
Each week we’ll have very short, but difficult, readings.  These will be poems, prose, essays, book excerpts – often pieces of text that don’t quite fit these nametags.  The readings are meant to challenge our thinking as we write, both on our own and in groups.  I am aware that this is a 4 credit course, and so will be keeping the readings  brief, i.e., around 10-20 pages per week. Sometimes the readings will be audio or visual links.
 
There are NO BOOKS TO PURCHASE for this course.  All readings will come in the form of weblinks sent via email and posted on our course blog, sent as attachments to you, or handed out in class.  You may comment on the blog, post work on the blog (creative, essay, whatever) – but this is extra, i.e., not required of you (think of it as a chalkboard for further experimentation when you have the time to do so). 
 
I will send you a syllabus (subject to small changes) in my next email, but for now, readings will include pieces by: Blanchot, Derrida, Waldrop, Spahr, bpNichol, Said, Toscano, and Darragh, among others.  For those of you familiar with these writers, great!  For those of you who are not, I will offer some context during lectures and, if one or all catch your attention, I’ll be able to direct you on where to go to read fuller works by and about them.  
 
WRITING!
 
This is primarily a “creative writing” course, albeit one that challenges our thinking about what creative writing is and can be.  We’ll work in two, complementary ways: 1) you’ll be responsible for generating your own individual manuscripts – these can be pieces you are already working on and want to fine tune through critique, or they can be things that you want to try out and never had the chance to do so.  Keep in mind that this is a part-time course, and so don’t expect your peers to critique your 300 page novel!  2) There will be some opportunity for us to write collaboratively, i.e., do small projects (rituals, exercises, games) in peer groups.  By the end of this quarter you’ll have a small portfolio of your own work (in progress or finished) plus group writings.  
 
SCHEDULE
 
Wednesdays from 6pm-8pm I’ll primarily be lecturing.  This will also be a time for guests to come. Saturdays from 4pm-6pm will be time to do in-class group critique, writing projects, and, often to go outside the classroom and cause creative mayhem (more on that in my syllabus email).  By week 3 we’ll have formed groups of 4 or 5 that will be autonomous working groups.
 
If you have any questions at all, feel free to email me. I am really looking forward to working with all of you, forming bonds and getting creative in ways that foster a supportive and warm atmosphere. Things are going to get interesting… For now, before the first class, do the readings below.  They’ll serve as a sort of introduction to Experiments In Text, allowing us to have some foundation as we begin.  
 
Again, happy holidays and welcome!  
 
Solidarity,
David 

PS: feel free to visit my facebook page as well – there I will post bits of our syllabus, and, I usually use facebook as a kind of poetics blog fyi.  (I can’t believe I just asked you to visit my facebook page?!?) 

Derrida as interviewed by Elisabeth Weber:

“What is the relation between what you call the monsters of your writing and the memory of this absence of power?”

JD: If there were monsters there, the fact that this writing is prey to monsters or to its own monsters would indicate by the same token powerlessness. One of the meanings of the monstrous is that it leaves us without power, that it is precisely too powerful or in any case too threatening for the powers-that-be. Notice I say: if there were monsters in this writing. But the notion of the monster is rather difficult to deal with, to get a hold on, to stabilize. A monster may be obviously a composite figure of heterogeneous organisms that are grafted onto each other. This graft, this hybridisation, this composition that puts heterogeneous bodies together may be called a monster. This in fact happens in certain kinds of writing. At that moment, monstrosity may reveal or make one aware of what normality is. Faced with a monster, one may become aware of what the norm is an when this norm has a history – which is the case with discursive norms, philosophical norms, socio-cultural norms, they have a history – any appearance of monstrosity in this domain allows an analysis of the history of the norms. But to do that, one must conduct not only a theoretical analysis; one must produce what in fact looks like a discursive monster so that the analysis will be a practical effect, so that people will be forced to become aware of the history of normality. But a monster is not just that, it is not just this himerical figure in some way that grafts one animal onto another, one living being onto another. A monster is always alive, let us not forget. Monsters are living beings. The monster is also that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized. A monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely, the composition or hybridisation of already known species. Simply, it shows itself [elle se montre] – that is what the word monster means – it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure. One cannot say that things of this type happen here and there. I do not believe for example that this happens purely and simply in certain of my texts, as you said, or else it happens in many texts. The coming of the monster submits to the same law as the one we were talking about concerning the date. But as soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it, one begins, because of the “as such” – it is a monster as monster – to compare it to the norms, to analyse it, consequently to master whatever could be terrifying in this figure of the monster. And the movement of accustoming oneself, but also of legitimation and, consequently, of normalization, has already begun. One begins to repeat the traumatism that is the perception of the monster. Rather than writing monstrous texts, I think that I have, more than once, used the word monster to describe the situation I am now talking about. I think that somewhere in Of Grammatology I said, or perhaps it’s at the end of Writing and Difference, that the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant, to welcome it, that is, to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange, but also, one must add, to try to domesticate it, that is, to make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits. This is the movement of culture. Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection, that are denounced precisely as anomalies or monstrosities are often texts that, before being in turn appropriated, assimilated, acculturated, transform the nature of the field of reception, transform the nature of social and cultural experience, historical experience. All of history has shown that each time an event has been produced, for example in philosophy or in poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable, of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity.”  

THALIA FIELD, “EXPERIMENTAL THEATER IS HISTORY!”

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theater/v029/29.2field.html